Budapest New Tech Meetup Blog

Dear Google Video developers,

While in general I have high respect for the quality of Google engineering, compared to some of your other services, Google Video appears to be a badly abused bastard child, hacked together by some folks in a darkened basement in Elbonia.

For the year and the half the Budapest New Technology Meetup has been in existence my modest monthly mission was to upload five 10 minute videos. So far I have managed more than a hundred. However, I’m starting to feel like a flagellant for insisting on doing so. Allow me to enumerate some of the pain involved:

• The Java-based uploader app (which has not been updated in years) routinely gets stuck on file uploads…
• … which is not a big deal, since it can resume transfers… NOT! It claims to do so, however these uploads all turn out to be corrupted, once you have entered all the meta-data for them to go live.
• If you suffer through re-uploading the video with the same file name, the error remains. The only sure way to fix it is to rename the file then re-upload.
• “All your memory are belong to us”. The uploader appears to have a memory leak, so when uploading hundreds of megabytes, you’ll eventually have your RAM dominated by this app. I secretly hope you’re using it for some evil distributed computing purposes at least, otherwise this would be a stupid waste of resources.
• The uploader’s UI is lame, especially by Mac standards. Not that I’m really expecting any useful features here, just an uploader, after all… but what’s up with that file selector dialog?! Just give me a command line.
• The Java uploader has persistent issues with logging in. It fails inexplicably, while things are fine on the web. No, I didn’t have Caps Lock on.
• The web-based uploader, while painful for large files, seems to yield better results. However, it takes half a day for the uploaded video to show up in your uploaded files list after the cheerful email proclaiming “great success”.
• Oh, and the web based upload form doesn’t have all the meta-data fields available, so you still have to edit stuff later on the uploaded videos list.
• Saving the meta-data regularly fails with the well-known succinct “The server encountered an error. Please try again shortly.” message. Please change “soon” to “much later”, that would cause less frustration.
• There are also some occasional encoding problems. Look what became of a perfectly fine 5 minute h.264 video.
• The video view statistics, are quite minimalistic – so much so, that they mostly show zero views for all periods.

And finally a word on customer support. While famously lacking at Google, this is perfectly fine with services that work flawlessly most of the time, with some transient outages. Google Video however is not one of them. Just Google your own support forums, you’ll find the desperate cries about the issues above from the wretched souls who thought it would help to post there.

While I’m certain Google employees are prohibited from commenting on such blog posts as this without checking with HQ first, you could at least go ahead and fix this thing. I mean, you cannot seriously expect to index all the world’s information (not to mention world domination), if you can’t get a file upload right.

I’ll make one last attempt at re-uploading, then probably migrate to Vimeo or such (YouTube is also ghetto, but that’s for another post).

Thank you for listening.

Viktor Szathmáry
BPNT organizer

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 11:17 pm by phraktle and is filed under érdekességek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.